RMXP isn't playing *certain* MP3s

[Kain Nobel]

Hello and good day!

To make a long story short, I just imported a bunch of finished tracks into RPG Maker XP and, for some unknown reason, a bunch of them simply won't play at all, not in the editor's music player nor in the game. All tracks are mp3, and the ones that do play work just fine, I can change the pitch and everything no problem. The ones that can't play, when called in-game, don't play at all and cause the game to lag badly until a working piece of music is called.

Before I had this problem, I had taken a bunch of tracks that were only in my "*/Music/" folder (as I play everything in my media player), cut and paste them into my custom RTP folder, replacing the ones that already existed. Prior to this, only a couple of existing tracks in that folder I had problems with, but now I have an issue with a majority of the tracks. Is it because I replaced them? I don't know :(

Last thing to note, these tracks do play just fine in a media player (WMP, QuickSilver, etc), I'm not sure if they play correctly in VX or VX Ace, but they don't play at all in XP.

[Taylor]

RMXP does this with me sometimes too. There must be a certain format of mp3 that it can't handle. I've found putting a problematic file through Audacity (importing it then re-exporting) often solves the problem. I don't know what it is though, sometimes even RM2k3 flips out (the potentially infamous infinite "Not implemented." bug). Bit-rate? Certain tags? Album artwork?

[Kain Nobel]

Every track is rendered @ 192 bit-rate, they each are fully labelled with album information, the cover picture, a 'mood' tag (specifying battle themes, scene themes, etc) and a notes for composer info and whatnot. Some tracks didn't play even before I dragged in their more up-to-date versions. On that note...

Months ago I started looping each BGM in a media player and took extensive notes on things that could be improved, so I'm just redoing all the tracks right now. Yes, today is going to be my official OST remaster day, and all the newly rendered ones are playing properly!

I'm no longer worried about this issue, but I will leave the topic open for anybody who might know what was wrong with the older tracks I made as I'm still curious what caused them to not play in RM.

And thank you Taylor for the Audacity suggestion! Whatever tracks I'm not going to make improvements to, I'll use Audacity to fix them :D

[MetalRenard]

If you have problems with looping audio (clicks, pops, all that) then I made a thread about that too at some point. :)
Pro-tip: Don't make songs louder when you re-master them. ;)

[Kirito]

another problem could occur if they have any DRM on them.